


Impossible Object

by perceived_nobility



Series: Impossible Object 'Verse [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Arthur has Completely Rational Trust Issues, Arthur has a history, Canon-Typical Violence, Discussions of medical transition, Eames is English, Eventually RST (Resolved Sexual Tension), FTM Arthur, M/M, Spoilers for In Bruges, Trans Character, UST, brief mention of transphobia, canon-typical suicide mention, largely this is a happy trans fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 00:22:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3188798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perceived_nobility/pseuds/perceived_nobility
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he’s sixteen, Arthur steals $25,000, flies himself to Florida, and has top surgery.  This is the story of what happens next.</p><p>AU insofar as Arthur is trans and Inception takes place circa 2020.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impossible Object

Eames’s first thought is that the new point man holds his body like it’s a weapon: a contact mine, a sniper rifle—something invisible and precise and very, very lethal.  His second thought is that the new point man is unfairly, almost _maliciously_ attractive.

Arthur is a prickly personality wrapped in devastatingly well-tailored suits. He comes as a package deal with Dominic Cobb: buy one overdramatic extractor and get a sharp, shadowy point man free. Arthur does a lot of straightening of papers, writing of lists, and reminding Dom to take his jacket with him when he goes out for coffee.  He’s in the office before everyone in the morning and after everyone at night, and throughout hours and hours of mind-numbingly dull strategy meetings, he completely ignores Eames’s wanton flirting. 

Eames is sure they’ll shag before the end of the job. 

 

For all his ruthlessly efficient competence, Arthur is still relatively new to dream share.  Or at least Eames assumes he is, because apparently he’s never worked with a forger before.

“You can look like anyone?” he asks one day over takeaway Thai eaten in the cold back of the warehouse.

Eames tries to steal a piece of chicken from Arthur’s plate, but he knocks Eames’s chopsticks away without so much as raising an eyebrow.  “Anyone at all, darling,” Eames drawls, making a show of sucking at a piece of satay.  He expects Arthur to laugh: this is the sort of thing that makes him laugh, a snort and a chuckle and a duck of his head.  But instead he looks thoughtful, mouth twisted in a frown.

“And you can keep it up as long as you want within the dream?”

Eames would roll his eyes if Arthur didn’t look so charmingly earnest.

“Of course.” 

Arthur opens his mouth like he’s got another question, so Eames lays a hand on Arthur’s forearm, squeezing gently.

“Would you like me to show you?”

 

Arthur dreams them into a nondescript, glass-and-steel office tower. Even grey light filters in from an overcast sky.  Projections brush past them, clad in suits not quite as devastatingly tailored as Arthur’s. Eames finds himself suppressing a smile. He’d been right in pegging Arthur as a show-off.

For his part, Arthur’s looking, if anything, slightly hurt.  “You look the same,” he accuses, fidgeting as if he wants to cross his arms. 

Eames flashes him a smile.  “Of course I do, darling.  I don’t know how you want me yet.”

Arthur rolls his eyes and looks for a moment like he’s chewing at the inside of his cheek. Eames has never seen him like this before, although he’ll be the first to admit he hasn’t seen Arthur like much at all aside from someone who works far too bloody hard and uses far too bloody much product in his hair.  But whenever Eames has seen him—early morning in the office with a large takeaway coffee at his elbow, bent over a drafting table with his sleeves crisply rolled, even coming in from a midsummer downpour, his brief case shielding his head as water drips off the slimy ends of his hair—he’s never looked uncomfortable in the way he does now.  He’s jittery and tense, like what he really wants to do is implode.

“Do an old man,” he says.

Eames glances around the atrium and shakes his head.  “Not here, love.  Too many projections about.  I wouldn’t want to scare them.”  It’s mostly a lie: he is slightly worried that Arthur will panic when he forges, given how nervous he is already, but it’s mostly because Eames wants to see more of Arthur’s dream space.  If taking a walkabout helps calm Arthur down, so much the better.

Arthur leads them up a staircase at the back of the atrium, a sleek thing made of angular black metal and glass that spirals upward at ninety degree angles. Eames runs his hand up the railing just this close to Arthur’s elbow.  No response. He keeps at it, willing to be patient, and looks out the glass front of the building at a street that’s slick with dew.

After a few minutes he realizes that his view of the street hasn’t changed, though he’s climbed at least four flights of stairs.  He stops, and ahead of him Arthur stops too.

Looking down, Eames sees how the bottom of the staircase doesn’t connect with the section next to it.  It’s an optical illusion.  Penrose steps.

“Paradox,” Arthur says, obviously pleased.

 

They end up in an elevator with mirrored walls.  Arthur hits the emergency stop button as soon as they’re inside.

“Go,” he says.

Eames smiles, big and delighted.  “What, no foreplay, darling?  I didn’t take you for the quick and dirty ty—”

Arthur shoulders into Eames’s space, a breath away from caging him with his arms. He smells crisp and clean, even in the dream.  His suit, Eames sees, is a soft wool blend in light gray, almost summery.  Eames raises an eyebrow, acknowledging the uptick in his pulse so he can ignore it now but enjoy the memory later.  He forges an old man, bent and unsteady, with spectacles on a beaded string.  It’s a form he uses to get sympathy from a mark, something to walk out into an intersection and leave, helpless.

Arthur’s whole body goes slack.  He steps back against the far wall of the elevator.  Careful.

This is definitely the most interesting dream Eames has been in in recent memory, all because of Arthur.  Arthur, who is buttoned up and clamped down so hard topside that Eames had begun to wonder if he was actually some sort of carefully disguised automaton, controlled via long-range receiver.  He’s pretty sure he’s never seen Arthur do so much as sweat.  He’s never even run into him in a bathroom, washing his hands or splashing water on his face.  But now, Arthur is almost naked in the way his stunned incredulity unfurls itself for Eames.  He hasn’t fumbled for his totem yet but his left hand is pressed to his pants pocket, where it’s more than likely stashed. 

Eames gives him a moment to adjust, watches for his shoulders to square, for him to pick his weight up from the wall and hold it again.  Then Eames shifts up, into a tall, lanky blonde that’s popular with prospective employers.  They’re usually impressed that Eames can forge a woman, like sex is some essential thing, and a man could never imagine the heft and weight of breasts, the upward cant of a slimmer, wider pelvis.  Eames doesn’t particularly _like_ forging women: there’s more to remember, basic building blocks of the body that he otherwise wouldn’t have to pay attention to.  But it’s not that he _can’t do it_. It’s just that his mind slides off the narrow edges of shoulders and trips a little over the low center of gravity, like it’s wearing a too-small shoe.  The vocal cords are the hardest part: if he doesn’t watch himself, he’ll give this slim soprano a rough, uneven base.

For his part, Arthur looks if not less, then perhaps _differently_ impressed than the extractors Eames usually shows this forge off to.  He’s crossed his arms tight over his chest, fists clenched on the fabric of his sleeves. His jaw is set, like Eames is showing him a particularly graphic image and he just has to tolerate it until Eames puts it away.  But there’s something in the tilt of his head, in the awed hush of his breathing, that reads as intrigued.

“Darling,” Eames says in the forge’s lilting Texan drawl, “Don’t tell me you don’t like what you see.”  He winds a lock of hair around a finger for emphasis.  Arthur rolls his eyes.

Before he can say something predictably cutting, Eames shifts again. He goes shorter, less lanky. Dark hair on an open, rounded face. A button-down slightly too long in the arms, trousers too short at the ankles.  He’s Arthur, or at least how Eames imagines Arthur, at sixteen or seventeen, still in the throes of puberty with a jawline and a set of shoulders to grow into. This is Eames’s favorite final trick: forging the person who asked him to forge.  He likes to do them as children, but it’s hard to deconstruct a life history from an adult body alone, so he saves that for when he’s had a chance to dig up their baby pictures.  Teenagers are easier to do on the fly, especially if the mark is young. All it takes is a subtle enlarging of the head, a softening of the features, a sagging of posture, and the mark is staring at their younger self.  Their reactions tell Eames more about them than all the research he could ever do.

Arthur barely glances at him.   His dark eyes slide onto and off Eames like oil on water.  But Eames watches his forge catch in Arthur’s throat: he swallows, twice, hard.  Words, maybe, forced down. Or tears.

Eames shifts back to himself and finds Arthur staring at him from the other side of the elevator, something burning deep behind his eyes. He catches Eames watching and without breaking away, tucks whatever feeling he has somewhere where Eames can’t see it anymore.  The elevator dings and Arthur’s out first, not running away, but not lingering either. The elevator dings again and slides shut, its golden, mirrored surface reflecting Eames, alone. A door perfunctorily closed between them.

 

They don’t shag by the end of the job.  Eames finds himself too intrigued to be disappointed.

 

*

 

Six months later, they’re knee deep in prep for another job—extraction of trade secrets valuable enough to buy Eames a town in every country he’s not allowed to enter, which he might do once this is all over, just to be contrary. It’s a complex operation: the mark is trained, and the payoff’s high because they’re the third team to be recruited to the job.  The other two had failed and slunk away into quiet, wounded anonymity to wait out the bounties on their heads.  Good people had gone down for this, people Eames had known for years and a couple he’d even respected, and there are some days when, as he pores over another, even more intricate draft of the second level of the dream, he wonders why the hell he’s even bothering.

Eames has to forge two people, both in the second level of the dream. It’s not the most difficult thing to pull off, except that the build leaves him without a good window of privacy to shift from one to the other, and the architect is one of those artsy types who doesn’t like being told to compromise the aesthetic value of his labyrinth so that other team members can get their bloody work done.

 

Arthur goes down with him for a test run, right after Eames shouts himself so far down the architect’s throat he’ll be tasting him for a week. Arthur’s the dreamer, which Eames is thankful for not only because Arthur’s almost superhuman professional unflappability means that everything is still completely stable, despite the fact that he’d just had to pull Eames off the architect.  In Eames’s defense, the architect deserved what he got, and probably more, but he is heroically willing to look past it for the sake of professionalism.

At least, that’s what he’d told Arthur when he’d held out his wrist for the IV. It hadn’t totally been a lie.

Now, Eames rolls his shoulders and lets the sprightly shape of the mark’s little sister settle over him, pulling him down into just this side of prepubescent girlish energy. He races through the garden party, scattering skirts and upsetting empty lawn chairs, until he finds Arthur leaning against a fountain in a secluded corner sheltered by hedges, hands in his pockets. He’s dressed himself in a summery jacket of dove grey linen that does absolutely devastating things to the line of his shoulders, the taper of his waist.  As Eames gets closer, he sees Arthur’s shirt is cinched tight with a sky blue bow tie, something, Eames thinks, that he really shouldn’t be able to pull off without looking a bit like an uncle gone astray.

“You look like someone’s lost uncle,” he tells him when he’s close enough.

Arthur scoffs with a jerk of his chin.  He’s looking everywhere but Eames, keeping an eye on the projections that filter around them, laughing indistinctly and sipping at flutes of champagne. He swallows, and Eames watches the tendons of his neck flex with it, framed so elegantly by his collar and that stupid, unfair bow tie.

It could be put to much better use tying Arthur’s wrists to a headboard.

As if he can sense the direction of Eames’s thoughts, Arthur pins him with a glare. “You’ve just met the mark,” he says, “You’ve run over here to lead him to his long-lost brother. If you’ve got so much time to look at the scenery, tell me why you almost throttled Daiki topside.”

“You’ll excuse me,” Eames says in his eleven-year-old voice, “But the view is spectacular.”

Arthur snorts, but it catches a little in his throat.  He looks suddenly hunted, shoulders coming up incrementally to cage around his face.  The motion is small, reflexive, and he stops it almost as soon as it starts. “I’ll have you know it is deeply disturbing to be propositioned by a kid.”

Eames tilts his head, twirls to fan out his skirt.  Arthur rolls his eyes, opens his mouth to say something else sarcastic and utterly unbecoming, but Eames shifts before he can, shooting up a foot and broadening out into the mark’s elder brother.  Arthur’s mouth hangs open as his eyes flick over Eames’s face, his torso, his arms.  He looks like he’s been punched, like a bomb has just detonated somewhere around his solar plexus. He rocks forward, reaching out as if to stroke down Eames’ face, but he seems to remember himself, shaking his head sharply and redirecting the errant hand to run over his immaculately gelled hair instead.  There’s something jittery in the way he moves, the way he turns away from Eames, that speaks of how rattled he is.

“Darling,” Eames drawls, “I’m flattered.”

Arthur’s jaw clenches.  “Don’t let it go to your head.  It’s impressive work is all.”

“Someone get a camera,” Eames replies, “So I can treasure forever the moment that Arthur—“

He’s interrupted when a Greyhound bus comes fishtailing through the hedges and smashes into his side.

 

*

 

When he’s sixteen, Arthur steals $25,000, flies himself to Florida, and has top surgery. 

Or, to put it more accurately, Arthur convinces his friend Rob to steal $75,000 by siphoning thousandths of cents off the dollar of ad revenue on a reasonably popular free internet radio station while he, Arthur, uses a not insignificant portion of that money to buy them fake ID’s and medical records, and two very real round trip plane tickets. 

It’s almost laughably easy to pull off.  Arthur learned sometime around his tenth birthday, when he started selling ripped tape cassettes on his elementary school campus to help his parents make rent, that it wasn’t necessarily his skill set that mattered, but his ability to find and retain people who could do whatever needed doing. By the time he was fourteen, he’d refined this theory: certain skills, like first aid and CPR and financial literacy and a working knowledge of the law and, possibly, the ability to take down someone a foot taller and with 80% more testosterone in their blood—these skills were necessary for anyone, specifically and especially Arthur, to have. Other things, like the ability to forge medical records, could be contracted out, assuming Arthur had adequate financial resources.

He schedules his surgery for two weeks before Rob’s, so he’ll get his drains out a few days before Rob goes under.  Hopefully, he’ll be able to help change Rob’s bandages and wash his back and manage his morphine, albeit with limited ability to lift anything.

They travel light, figuring it takes less upper body strength to soak and soap up a shirt every other day than to carry fourteen of them.

In the end, he feels shittier than he expected to immediately post-op: weak and slow and a little bit panicky, off-balance with a literal weight off his chest. Rob is in no shape to fly home on their departure date, so Arthur blows another wad of cash on keeping their hotel room for another week and reserving two first-class cabins on Amtrak.

Rob wants to keep the siphon script running when they get home, but Arthur forbids it. It’s accrued enough while they were away to pay both their families’ rent, water, and power for over a year, which is also more than both their families make annually, combined. He insists on watching Rob shut it down, feeling guilt crush against his ribs like his binders used to. It’s the right thing to do, he tells himself.  He’d be no use to his parents in federal prison.

 

*

 

Arthur’s a senior at USC, finishing his application to Harvard Law, when the US Military comes knocking at his door.  They show up at 5 a.m., right as Arthur is getting back from a run. A whole strike team, it looks like, is camped outside his building, getting ready to bust down the door.

“Can I help you?” he says loudly, impressed with how little his voice shakes.

There follows a very tense conversation in which the nice officer—a Major, they sent a fucking _Major_ —seems to have Arthur confused with someone who pays his tuition by stealing and selling questionably confidential US Military secrets. Arthur has never heard such an outrageous claim in his life, and he’s perfectly willing to show the nice Major his financial aid statement.  Besides, he has no knowledge at all of how to steal US Military secrets.

When it becomes clear they’re less focused on arresting him and more interested in recruiting him, Arthur smiles thinly.

“In that case, there’s something I need you to see.”  He disappears into his bedroom and takes a long moment to scream silently into a pillow before returning with a crisp manila folder full of reasons he can’t join the armed forces.

The letter from his therapist diagnosing him with Gender Identity Disorder a la the DSM-IV.  His prescription for testosterone.  The paperwork to change his name with the State of Illinois and the US Federal Government.

The Major—Major Grant—reads over everything before carefully replacing it in the file and handing the file back to Arthur.

“Arthur,” he says, and Arthur hates him, “What do you know about lucid dreaming.”

Arthur stares blankly at him, the folder a dead, sagging weight in his hands. “No,” he says, “No you can’t.”

Major Grant keeps talking.  His voice fades into a background of panic and white noise.

“No,” Arthur says again, louder, “You can’t do this.  You still use the fucking DSM-III and by that definition I am _insane_ , you can’t—you’re not _legally allowed to_ —”

Major Grant holds up his hand for silence.  Arthur gives it to him, entirely against his will.

“We can overlook,” he pauses, rakes his eyes up and down Arthur like he’s skinning him, “This.”

Arthur clenches his hands into fists.  He can feel himself shaking.

“Of fucking course you can,” he growls, locking his elbows so he doesn’t punch the major in the face, “You can’t handle another fucking Chelsea Manning.”

 

*

 

Once, just once, at the end of his first month at a military base in the middle of the godforsaken backwoods, Arthur makes the mistake of going to pick up his medication himself.  The medical center is across the compound from his room, and when he gets there the pharmacist is aggravatingly unwilling to give him the brown box clearly labeled with his name.  “This came through as insulin,” she explains, squinting at a computer screen off to the side, right where Arthur can’t see it, “But the listed dosage doesn’t make any sense for your body weight.”

Arthur shrugs, trying to force his palms to stop sweating through sheer force of will. “Dr. Williams wrote it out so I’m sure it’s fine.”  He reaches for the box but she puts her hand over it. 

“You’ve self-injected before?” she asks, “Do you know how to do it?”

Arthur rolls his eyes expansively.  “I’ve been on the stuff since I was thirteen, I think I’ve got it down.” He makes an exaggerated grabby motion. “Can I have my meds now?”

The pharmacist sighs and pushes the box over.  “I really hope Dr. Williams got the dosage right,” she mutters, “I don’t want you killing yourself.”

Arthur presses his mouth into what he hopes is an approximation of a smile. “Thanks for the concern.”

On his way back to his room, people Arthur doesn’t even _know_ seem to descend out of nowhere, jostling him and asking after what’s in the box. “Hey, Arthur, that a care package from your mom?”  “Got a girlfriend you’re not telling us about?” “Hey, lemme see that, I bet I can guess what’s in it!” One of them makes a lunge for the box but Arthur blocks him with his elbow, twisting down to torque the guy’s wrist.

“Lay off,” he growls.

They don’t. Arthur ends up ducking over the box and running for it, tearing across the compound with his entourage hooting and hollering after him like a pack of jackals.

After that, he gets his meds delivered to him by the same courier who brings dispatches from the major.  It’s easier that way: the guy seems both reliable and completely uninterested in anything to do with Arthur’s personal life.  He even gets the label on the box changed to match the dosage of insulin he’d need if he did actually have diabetes.  If the box ever gets opened on the way over, he can always claim that it must have been mispacked.

 

*

 

It gets so bad that Arthur starts planning how he’ll run a full year and a half before he ever tries it. 

It’s not the other recruits to the dreamshare program: they’re just a bunch of kids trying to make the best of a shitty place.  At one point, one of them—Christina, with a BA in Architecture and Escher tattoos under her uniform—catches Arthur changing and, after a conversation that is long and hard and not nearly as bad as Arthur had thought it would be, offers to get Arthur’s meds for him in place of the courier. It’s kind of her, offered and accepted a little hesitantly, and Arthur finds that it’s nice to smile at someone and believe incautiously that they’re, in some respects, safe.

And it’s not the living conditions: Arthur was given a private room when he signed on, away from the rest of the squad, with a bunk and a trunk and its own private bathroom that Arthur has to shimmy himself into and out of, it’s so small. It’s fine, if a little lonely sometimes, but if he has free time he can go hang out in the rec center or the mess hall, or go wait by the baseball diamond until someone shows up to practice pitching with.  For the most part, he likes having his own space for the security it affords him.  And he doesn’t have to put up with people snoring or sleepwalking in the barracks, which his squad-mate Dylan says is the absolute worst. “You can’t win, man,” he says one day, boots propped up against Arthur’s wall as he lounges on his bed, “The night you can sleep through the noise you miss the sergeant shouting you awake and then it’s extra miles in the morning.”  Arthur makes a sympathetic noise and keeps sketching from his trunk. Dylan is stocky and short, just a little taller than Arthur himself.  He has a wide smile, thick black curls shaved close to his skull, and shoulders that look like smoothed off boulders.  Arthur is drawing him—again—in dark crosshatched ballpoint. Arthur wouldn’t call himself a good artist, and he doesn’t know anyone else who would either, but he likes the symmetry in faces and the precision of pens, the feel of paper, rough with pressed-in ink.  It may be reckless of him to try to draw Dylan whenever he comes over, but that too is a luxury Arthur fully intends to enjoy.

The bad part isn’t his coworkers or his life outside of work. The bad part is the work itself.

At first, Arthur’s put into a training program with the people who grow into his squad.  It’s half basic training, half training in dreams.  Things start badly when the tech preparing the sedative doesn’t believe or doesn’t remember that Arthur’s pseudoallergic to egg whites, so his first time under is cut terrifyingly short when he rockets awake, itching and throbbing at the injection site.  He rips the IV out of his skin and stumbles around the room, blind and still half in the dream. Adrenaline propels him as far as the door, where the sedative catches up with him and sends him crashing to the ground.  The tech runs over, having flattened herself against the wall, and helps him back into the low lounge chair she’d sent him to sleep in.  “Why the _fuck_ ,” Arthur pants, as he squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates on getting his breathing under control, “Did you need to make a _sedative_ in _egg whites_?”

The tech murmurs something soothing, petting the tension out of his arms and smoothing hydrocortisone onto the injection site. 

“It’s not a fucking MMR vaccine,” he mutters, sliding slowly and jerkily back into sleep.

After that, they stabilize the sedative in something that doesn’t sometimes give Arthur anaphylaxis, so going under stops being the problem. The problem becomes what Arthur does once he’s dreaming.

 

By his third month in the program, Arthur has begun compiling three separate lists. They’re written in the back of his sketchbook, stored in his locked trunk whenever he’s not in his room.

The first is a list of things he knows about the shared dreaming program. It reads as follows:

      1) The official name of the program is Project Somnacin

      2) This would imply that the main purpose of the project was about developing Somnacin

      3) The assumption stated in 2) is false

      4) Project Somnacin is not about developing Somnacin, because at the time of Arthur’s initiation into the project, Somnacin has already been developed

      5) One small kindness in Arthur’s life is that he joined Project Somnacin after Somnacin was developed

      6) Project Somnacin is, in fact, about killing people

      7) It is about killing people, and it is about torturing people

      8) Because the killing and torturing happens in dreams, the government is even less liable for it than they are for Guantanamo Bay or Abu Graib

      9) Every single working day of Arthur’s life, he is coerced into building slaughterhouses for his squadmates to die in

      10) Every single day, he has to watch

      11) Every single day, after everyone else is dead, he has to shoot himself in the face

 

The irony that Arthur made sure he transitioned before he seriously thought about kissing a gun hurts somewhere deep in his gut.  But he can’t do anything about it, so he carries that ache in his ribs, tucked neatly into the healed hairline fractures there.

The irony that the fucking techs can’t modulate Somnacin doses to keep Arthur under only as long as he needs to be is practical enough that he demands a meeting with the Major and the entire tech team so they can fucking _figure out how to fix it_. Within a month, there’s a timing mechanism on the PASIV, calibrated to the time dilation in dreams, and Arthur just has to wait, wandering the deserts of his dreamscapes, for the kick.

 

The second list is comprised of things Arthur misses about home. This could technically be broken into two separate lists, one where “home” means his parents’ apartment in Chicago and the other where “home” means his own apartment in LA. But Arthur keeps the lists combined, because he wants  to keep them close. If he splits the lists, one of them might get lost.  The list reads as follows:

      1) Not being coerced into murder and suicide on a daily basis

      2) The warm air winding around him in the evening when he’d go for runs on the beach

      3) Sitting in the law library at USC, working his way through a thick LSAT prep book like the shape of his future was a connect-the-dots of correct answers to multiple-choice questions: something manageable, if he only worked hard enough

      4) The bite of the cold on his cheeks when he pulled up at his parents’ for winter break

      5) The hissing and sputtering of the space heater in his childhood bedroom, the cotton-soft silence when it died

      6) The satin kippah his mom had given him for his sixteenth birthday, light on the back of his head during Passover seder

      7) Rob’s dog, Rob Jr, a mangy mutt that was at least half Irish Setter, who dropped into Rob’s family when he and Arthur were five and who chewed industriously through all the paperbacks Arthur lent Rob after he renewed them from the library

      8) Kissing Anthony Mathis in the locker room before track practice, but just the first time

      9) Playing the ratty, loaner violin he used throughout middle- and high school orchestra: Mrs Hodge upstairs gave it to him and promised him he could keep it as long as he played it beautifully for her, through the floor.  He practiced every day at school until he could play on pitch, scared she’d take it away from him if she heard him screeching the bow across the strings.

      10) When the street froze and he and Rob skated all the way across the neighborhood with the salt truck behind them

      10 a) When he and Rob had to walk all the way back across the neighborhood in their socks, toes numb with cold and gritty with salt

      11) Holding hands on the boardwalk with Gregoire, the exchange student he’d dated for the semester Gregoire had spent at USC, who wore thick wooden rings and painted his nails black and went out at night in towering four-inch stilettos. 

      12) The smell of sautéing garlic on the gas stove in his apartment, the warmth of cooking for himself when his roommates weren’t home

      13) Feeling the couch tipping him towards the weight of his dad, like his dad was a planet and Arthur a moon

      14) Cuts on his knees and a broken wrist from the time he, Rob, and half their senior class broke into an abandoned factory and spent a night chasing each other and dancing around the dusty factory floor, sitting on fraying conveyor belts and smoking the weed someone’s sister had brought back from a trip to Oregon

      15) Lying on the floor of the living room, cocooned in blankets, watching Star Trek on grainy VHS (his mom found the original series in box set at a flea market and Arthur, tiny and seven years old, helped her carry it home); dressing up as Data for Halloween in a costume sewed by his mom and his grandma

      16) Watery coffee and sugar-sticky fingers on a steering wheel on Saturday mornings; the mock trial team piling into a rented van; sun blushing over the horizon as Arthur drilled with the other pretrial attorney about precedent; a scratchy suit—the first suit he bought for himself, not just a rented tux for prom—and scuffed shoes and “Arthur Lawless for the Prosecution”; “Actually, your Honor” strong and smart and sure, the quiet unknotting in the back of his head when he thought, _You can do this forever_

 

The third list is the ways Arthur has killed people, and the ways that he has died.

 

After six months in the program, Arthur has to start another list. The third list is retitled: Ways Alpha Squad Has Died _In Dreams._ The fourth list is called “Ways Alpha Squad Has Died In Real Life.”

 

After nine months, Arthur has a fifth list.  This list is written nowhere but the inside of Arthur’s mind. Even there, it’s locked so deep in his subconscious that it would take far more than the strength and cunning of Alpha Squad to extract it.  This list, the list Arthur repeats to himself when he brushes his teeth, when he runs through rain and sleet for BT, when he crouches on a rooftop and picks off members of his squad with an M24, is called “Steps to Escaping from Project Somnacin”.

 

*

 

Eames doesn’t see Arthur for almost two years after the garden party job. It’s not intentional or unintentional: he and Arthur happen to work different jobs and the days and months slip by as they’re wont to.  When they do meet again, it’s in Bruges, working extraction on a diplomat on holiday. Eames wastes no time making the appropriate references—“How can fucking swans not be somebody’s fucking thing, eh?”—but it becomes very obvious very quickly that Arthur has never seen _In Bruges_ , so Eames secrets him up to his hotel room one night to watch the thing on Arthur’s blocky, heavily encrypted laptop.  It seems to go over well: they work most of the way through the mini fridge’s collection of booze, Arthur laughs when he should at the film and goes so far as to take his waistcoat and shoes off.  Settled against Eames’s headboard, he lets his feet dangle off the side of the bed and wriggles his toes.  Eames almost leans over to kiss him, but between them on the screen, Ken falls out the window and the mood follows him. 

Still, Eames feels a surge of happiness and pride when, a week later when the job has gone pear-shaped and there are seven people pointing twelve guns at each other, and the diplomat’s body guard tells them to drop their weapons, Arthur quirks an eyebrow and says, “Don’t be stupid.  This is the shootout.”

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the shootout _also_ goes pear-shaped, and the group is forced to split: Arthur and Eames down the back stairs while their extractor and chemist dive out the window with none of Ray’s grace or banter. The body guards split up too, two of them after Arthur and Eames, legs splayed on the balcony as they take pock shots through its loose boards.  Eames ducks and keeps moving, tripping hard into the railing but upright, not shot. A burst of pain in his leg: he keeps moving, ignores it.  Behind him, Arthur slams into the balcony and swears. 

Eames whirls, processes the way Arthur’s bent over his left side, and brings up his gun. By the time he gets Arthur moving again, gripping his elbow hard even though Arthur pants and swears and insists he’s fine on his own, there’s blood dripping slowly through the slats of the balcony.

 

“Shit,” Arthur’s moving, sliding out of his jacket as he flies through the apartment they’re using as a safe house, heading for the bathroom. “Shit, fuck, fuck, fucking _shit_.” He swears as economically as he moves, in bursts of concentrated feeling.  Eames trails after him a little helplessly, his leg still throbbing in a way that means he’s probably got a hairline fracture somewhere. But Arthur’s bleeding all over the floor, dripping on the carpet as he gets his shirt off and flings it away. By the time Eames makes it to the bathroom, Arthur’s got a compress pressed to his side, soaked in what smells like half a bottle of rubbing alcohol.  His face is all screwed up in pain, tears streaking silently down his cheeks. As Eames watches, he staggers, slipping in his own blood.  Eames lurches the last few feet over to him and catches him under the armpits.

“Hush love, hush, I’ve got you,” he murmurs, leaning them both slowly forward until Arthur’s slotted between him and the sink.  Eames runs his hands in soothing circles over Arthur’s chest, feeling his heart hammering hard through his ribs.  “You’re all right, just a flesh wound, just a graze.” It’s not exactly a lie, but it’s much farther from the truth than Eames wants it to be.

Arthur hisses and readjusts the compress.  He’s leaning into Eames, free hand white-knuckle braced on the lip of the sink. Eames knows he should get him sitting down before he passes out, but he also knows he can’t take Arthur’s weight with his leg like this.  Ysenia the chemist should be here soon to make rendezvous and stabilize the both of them enough for travel: in the meantime, he just has to keep Arthur conscious. He keeps skating his hands over Arthur’s chest, trying to be a point of contact, motion slow enough to track but fast enough for Arthur to want to pay attention to.  Arthur, whose breaths are huge and shaky, whose eyes are squeezed shut, whose hair is sweaty and plastered to his forehead in ropes, whose hand holding the compress is starting to shake.

Eames’s hands hit a ridge of scar tissue at the base of Arthur’s pectorals and everything about Arthur goes still.

He meets Eames’s eyes in the cracked and streaky mirror above the sink, now splattered with a thin solution of alcohol and blood.  Eames opens his mouth to ask how Arthur is, to offer to hold the compress, but Arthur snaps “Lung surgery” in a voice tight and high with pain.  Eames shuts his mouth and just nods, stroking over the scar as he resumes his meanderings, leaning his cheek into the back of Arthur’s neck and doing his best to breathe big and strong and slow for him to follow.

Ysenia shows up ten minutes after rendezvous blessedly unharmed and in possession of a proper mobile medical kit.  She shoos Eames out of the bathroom while she stitches Arthur up.  He hobbles to a chair and collapses, thinking that no lung surgery he ever heard of left scars like that.

 

He doesn’t get a chance to ask about it for over a year, and when he does he’s slightly preoccupied by the fact that this time he’s the one bleeding and Arthur has ripped his obscenely expensive shirt in half to tourniquet Eames’s wound.

 

*

 

Arthur supposes it’s good he got into a life of crime because at least mob doctors don’t ask a lot of invasive, asinine questions.  They stitch what needs stitching, pry obscenely large piles of cash out of brief cases, and leave. 

He maintains multiple identities in countries with reliable national health insurance and it’s generally enough to get him his shots where and when he needs them. Arthur may have several words to say about the byzantine, corrupt, and discriminatory protocol for approving drugs in most countries, but he’ll take an evil corporate medical empire over back alley, black market drugs any day.  He’d buy his T outright if it wasn’t such an infuriatingly easy thing to trace. As it is, he makes sure he stays in stable countries with socialized healthcare as much as he can between jobs. It’s easier that way, less deadly.

 

*

 

When Arthur first starts dream share, he is dogged by an especially ruthless projection.  She stalks him through dreamscapes—even when he isn’t the dreamer and she knows only as much of the labyrinth as he does—never speaking, just long black hair like an oil slick and a kitchen knife dangling loosely from her hand.  She waits, staying just in the corner of his peripheral vision, until he’s busy, distracted; and then she lunges, and he’s locked with her, trying to get a foot in her gut to shove her off; and her hands are around his throat, her hair dripping into his mouth, choking him; and he wakes up gagging and fighting, brushing the memory of heavy, clinging weight off the back of his neck.

Eventually, he takes to shooting her in the face right when the dream begins, and if it scares the shit out of the other dreamers, at least it means he can focus on fending off their projections without also worrying about being stabbed in the back with a butcher’s knife.

A while after that, they send him to therapy because people are too jumpy to work with him, and he sits and snarls his way through his first and only session before sneering, “I’ve already got the diagnosis, thanks,” and walking out.

This is partly why he is unsurprised when Mal shows up in Dom’s work. It’s why he tolerates the trains trashing dreamscapes, why he puts up with being shot in the head over and over and over as Dom runs interference against her and dreams crash, loud and bright, around them; it’s why he waits, why he lets it happen, because he’s sure that at some point, Dom will grow out of it, like he did.

 

Dom doesn’t grow out of it, not really.  Or at least: he doesn’t grow out of it before he gets out of dreamshare. He retreats to America and Arthur doesn’t see him much, just gets a scratchy international call on Christmas. Arthur can hear James and Philippa laughing in the background, fading as Dom walks away, probably outside.

“She’s gone,” Dom says, after they’ve talked about Arthur’s work and Dom’s retirement—he’s taken up fishing, he says, something Arthur half believes. Somehow, he can’t picture Dom sitting on a lakeshore for hours, staring at nothing.  Can’t see him that far away from concrete and steel, from the tall currents of cities.  Dom sighs through the phone, heavy and slow.  “Was it like this with yours?  Did you, did you have to—”

“In the end,” Arthur says gently, “I built her a museum.”  Pillars of golden light, big painted ceilings, dust motes on the air.  Everything quiet and padded and dead.  She stays there, mostly, her knives in hermetically sealed cases labeled with small printed placards. The exhibit is macabre: lots of disembodied and dissected anatomy and weaponry.  But Arthur took care to make the space beautiful, even if it’s somewhere he rarely visits.

He’s not totally over her, of course.  Sometimes, after especially nasty jobs, when he’s pulled under by pain and morphine and physical exhaustion, she’s waiting for him.  She still has the kitchen knife, and she’ll cut at him with exquisite finesse, undoing everything he’s spent the last fifteen years carefully putting together.

But Dom doesn’t need to be told that.  He knows, maybe better than most, that nightmares aren’t dreams, not really. Fear is a beast untamed, untamable. Arthur’s always considered Dom lucky that Mal was spun of Dom’s guilt, because guilt can be unwoven. Arthur’s projection is coiled terror. Like her knives, she’s something to be blunted: made less lethal but never harmless.

“I tried to build Mal a museum,” Dom tells him. 

“No you didn’t,” Arthur says.  “You built her a temple.”

Dom hmm’s into the phone, not really listening.  Philippa’s voice comes through again, indistinct and soft. “I’ve gotta go,” Dom tells him, “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Arthur replies.  He could call it jealousy, this thing that he feels about Dom. Jealous that he has a family to return to, jealous that he gets to move on, take his pain and put it down when he doesn’t feel like carrying it any more.  He could call it longing, too.  Instead, he calls it friendship, and sometimes he calls it stupid.

 

 

*

 

For a while, Arthur orbits Eames like a loose comet, blazing into a job trailing smoke and grit and light, then blazing out again into the dark expanse of the criminal underworld.  Eames does his best to capture Arthur whenever they’re in contact, but it never quite works. Arthur always slips away, ignoring Eames’s flirting or shutting it down with a well-practiced glare. Eames watches him get better at it, watches him cultivate an air of aloofness and professionalism as crisply ironed as his trousers.  Time goes on, the Earth travels around the sun and Eames travels around the Earth, and the intervals between seeing Arthur get shorter.  Extractors start telling Eames they recruited him based on Arthur’s recommendations.  Arthur himself starts calling him with job offers.  Once, memorably, Arthur leans over and kisses Eames softly on the mouth when a mark’s projections start looking at them curiously.  It’s an old trick, a useful one, and there’s nothing in the press of Arthur’s mouth or the weight of his hand on Eames’s knee that indicates it to be anything more than a tactic, chaste and pragmatic. That doesn’t stop Eames from chasing him when he draws back, from catching his hand when he rises and pressing a tiny kiss of his own into his palm.  Arthur smiles at him, small and playful, before walking away.

Now, Eames is pressed to a wall halfway down a deserted hotel hallway. Arthur’s panting into his mouth, making low little desperate noises.  His hands are fisted in Eames’s lapels, but his body is bowed away, a tight curve of pinstripes and Oxford twill.  His sleeves are rolled to the elbows, but neatly.  His hair is still gelled perfectly in place. Eames licks into Arthur, trying to draw him in.  He reaches around Arthur and pulls him in by the nape of his neck.  Arthur comes, a little, smoothing his hands in big greedy strokes over Eames’s shoulders.  He nips at Eames’s lips, still too far away; it’s taken years to get him this close and he’s still so frustratingly untouchable. 

Eames tells him so, whispers it into Arthur’s jaw before he bites the place he pressed the words, as if he’s binding them to Arthur’s skin. Arthur yelps, bites his lip hard. His hands stutter on Eames’s back. Eames grins, sliding his hands down to finally, _finally_ cup Arthur’s arse even as he tongues at the skin at Arthur’s collar, drawing his blush down his pretty neck. He wants to take Arthur apart, piece by piece, button by button.  He wants to disarm that weapon Arthur keeps primed inside himself, lay out each piece reverently and dirty them, all of them, until Arthur’s a shuddering mess against him, completely undone.  Arthur groans when Eames sucks lightly under his jaw.  He’s going clingy, body curving into Eames.  He’s shifting his hips, teasing against Eames’s hands.

Eames slides his hand over the plane of Arthur’s hip, sharp even under his shirt, and starts moving in for his fly.

“None of that, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says, softly, into his ear.  A hand is around his wrist, squeezing so hard his bones grit together. 

“Aah,” he says, in pain.  He couldn’t break this hold even if he tried.  Not without doing Arthur some pretty serious damage.

Arthur bends his arm up until Eames’s wrist is flattened to the wall somewhere near his face.  He looks sharp, all barely sheathed steel, and when he smiles it’s quick and glinting, like a knife. He leans in and kisses Eames, deep and wet and dirty, while his fingertips draw soft, swirling patterns over the sensitive inside of Eames’s wrist.  Eames is dizzy with it: Arthur’s kisses stealing his breath and the pure animal thrill of having inadvertently thrown himself against an electric fence.

Something is out of _bounds_.  There are _rules._ Rules Eames wants to bend until they shatter _._

Arthur breaks away, color high and splotchy in his cheeks.  His eyes are pinprick bright, skittering as he maps Eames’s face. He looks, not wrecked, not yet, but like he could be.  Like he’s a column of marble showing Eames the form of the sculpture underneath.

He steps back, smooths both hands over his hair, still immaculately gelled. Eames’s hand falls to his side with a heavy thump.

Arthur walks away.  His shoulders are straight, his movements sure.  He is not inviting Eames to follow.

 

*

 

In his childhood, Arthur played softball.  He was catcher, originally, and then second-baseman, because he had excellent hand-eye coordination and liked blocking people. He was, all in all, pretty good at it: his team won regionals three years straight in middle school, to much squealing and overall shrill, bouncy, pigtailed delight. 

More than he remembers actually playing softball, he remembers watching baseball on TV with his dad.  Arthur’s father was the kind of Irish-American who took hold of Boston and never let go, even though he’d never actually visited, much less lived there.  So every Red Sox game was broadcast at full volume through their tiny Chicago living room, and Arthur would stay up late to watch—the only other person in the house besides his dad who cared about the slow, calculated nature of the game.  He loved pitchers’ duels the best: the way they intended every twist and turn of the ball, how the entire field drew close in breathless anticipation. It was the closest thing to pure logic in sports he’d ever seen, and the fact that the players were dressed in sleek, bright white uniforms like angels or scientists only helped him love it more.  He went as far as acquiring a habit of chewing sunflower seeds before he found out there was nowhere convenient to spit the shells and that, even if he kept a baggie with him specifically for that purpose, his chin still got covered with drool.

He quit the sunflower seeds but kept the sport, close in his chest, to the point that when Eames casually maligns it during a pre-job round of drinks Arthur almost comes unglued.  He’s been watching it over Ariadne’s shoulder, a playoff game on mute in the hotel bar. It’s extra innings and the pitching is getting sloppy, balls wafting almost lazily out of the strike zone, and he’s just about to make a comment about it when Eames catches the direction of his gaze and mutters something about how this is the problem with Americans, they can’t appreciate a truly great, masculine sport like rugby and instead waste their time on drivel like this.

Arthur, resisting the urge to kick him soundly in the crotch under the table, bites out something cutting about how many head injuries Eames has evidently suffered playing just such masculine sports and their apparent effect on his reasoning and judgement.

Eames’ eyebrows arch subtly, that obnoxious, infuriating smirk playing across his mouth.

“Methinks that Arthur dost protest too much,” he murmurs, “Tell me darling, in your youth, did you ever slide smoothly into third base?”

“Your innuendo has a terrible fake accent,” Arthur replies primly, finishing his drink.

“Hey,” Ariadne breaks in, apparently deciding she’s had enough, “Eames, weren’t you telling me the other day that you played cricket for Eton or something? That’s got to be less manly than baseball.”

Eames roars with laughter and Arthur explains, around a bubbling series of chuckles, that even if Eames is posh and played cricket, he didn’t do it for Eton.

“Some faith you have in me, pet,” Eames replies, “For all you know I’m the prodigal son of a major British lord, run away form all my suffocating aristocratic duties.”

“Oh yes,” Ariadne returns, leaning between them and affecting a terrible mockery of a London accent, “I’m sure you spent your days having tea with the Queen.”

“Maybe I did,” Eames says indignantly, but he’s looking at Arthur, not Ariadne, and there’s a soft kind of mirth in his eyes, “I was a proper little dandy, top hat and all.  Played cricket like a proper git, too.”

Arthur actually smiles at him.  It’s not an apology, but Eames also doesn’t know there’s anything to apologize for, so on balance it’s enough to let Arthur buy him another drink.

 

*

 

Perhaps in petty revenge, Eames drags him to a rugby match the next time they’re working together.  Gloucester vs Saracens, Eames tells him, and doesn’t let him forget.  Eames, who is decked out head-to-toe in red, black and white, jumping up and screaming whenever there’s a tackle or a score.  Eames, who shouts indecipherable things at Arthur in between bouts of cursing and chanting, words that make absolutely no sense but are probably very important to the game.  Eames, who is very obviously _very_ enthusiastic, telling Arthur bits of trivia that implies that he’s been following Gloucester possibly his entire life and that he may or may not have grown up close enough to Kingsholm Stadium to see almost every single home game.  At some point, Arthur finds out that Eames used to play rugby in school. He was an eighthman, which is a position that sounds either superfluous or just uncreatively named. Arthur has no idea what an eighthman does.  He drinks his warm, overpriced beer and waves the novelty scarf Eames had shoved into his hands before they’d gotten on the tube.  It’s starting to fray at the seams: Arthur wonders how many years Eames has owned it.

Later, in the pub, Eames tries again to explain the intricacies of the game. Earnest over cold, cheaper beer, he draws out plays on the greasy surface of the table.  The pub is loud, packed with ecstatic Gloucester fans singing and yelling and hitting each other soundly on the back. Arthur spots a few Saracens supporters sulking over pints and looking resentful, but they clear out when the Gloucester contingent starts bashing into them when they toast. Arthur has to lean close to Eames to hear.  Between the noise and the booze the game still isn’t making any sense, so he swipes a sleeve over the table, erasing Eames’s markings, and insists he starts over. But no gibberish this time.

Eventually, Arthur has a working understanding of rugby, based solely on the numbers of the jerseys and without any technical vocabulary whatsoever. But when he draws out one of the fumbled plays from the match and asks if number thirteen shouldn’t have done _this_ instead, Eames positively _beams_.

 

The job itself grinds on for an eternity.  With Dom retired, the dreamshare community is down their best extractor, and Arthur is getting very sick of working with amateurs.  The plan isn’t tight, the background on the mark spotty, and Arthur works for three weeks straight on less than three hours sleep a night trying to beat it into shape.  It doesn’t help that the Somnacin shipment is mysteriously delayed, resulting in a lot of agitated rescheduling.  When it finally arrives, it’s cut-rate, black market stuff, stabilized in fucking egg whites. Arthur puts his foot down, refuses to go under unless they get a new batch.  They’re delayed another two weeks, and he’s pretty sure the entire team wants to kill him.

Except, strangely, for Eames.  Arthur had expected him to be cagey about working in London—most people in dreamshare won’t work in their home countries: too many outstanding warrants—but he’s perfectly willing to kick around on Arthur’s surveillance missions, to bring him coffee at three a.m., to raise an eyebrow pointedly when the extractor suggests Arthur just take an antihistamine and get on with it. Arthur doesn’t need Eames’s support, but he can hardly fault him for acts so small they disappear, individually, into the working dynamic of the team.  It’s just that, by the time the job actually _happens_ , Arthur is pretty sure that he’s accrued enough of Eames’s kindness to fill a small house.

They go under, just the two of them, for a final run-through of Eames’s forge. It’s become something of a tradition since the garden party job, and Arthur quietly admits that he likes the routine. Usually, it calms him, gives him some space to cement the build, check for any last thing amiss. Arthur doesn’t get performance anxiety, but he does get keyed up in the last 24 hours or so before a job, and Eames’s presence, his endless innuendo and banter, gives Arthur somewhere to focus.

The build is a take on the New York Met, echoey hallways that loop past covered cases the mark will fill with her secrets.  The dream is set the week before the opening of a new exhibit: Eames is the curator, an old friend and colleague of the subject who’s called her in to beg her to let them display one of the pieces in her collection.  The museum is almost empty now, just the two of them wandering around the place, Eames doing various iterations of the curator’s flowery gestures, her fast, narrow walk.  Arthur’s not really paying attention: he’s focusing on holding the dream together, tired and stressed enough that he doesn’t fully trust himself to have remembered all of the last-minute changes.

Behind them, heels clack fast on tile. 

Arthur shuts his eyes.  “Fuck.”

He dreams a pistol into his waistband, turns, draws, fires.  The projection crumples, bleeding out on the floor. She’s whimpering weakly, but the sound echoes in the stony atrium, growing into something grotesque. The kitchen knife clatters as it slips from her hand.

Eames is staring at him, forge dropped.  “You all right, darling?”

Arthur shrugs, aims again, shoots the projection in the head.  Eames follows him away from her body.

“Will she be back?”

Arthur presses the heels of his hands against his eyes.  The job is in just over 26 hours.  “Maybe,” he allows.  “I’ll take care of it.”

 

She shows up during the busiest part of the job, which is fucking predictable. Arthur’s got his hands full dragging a covered painting down a hallway to present to the mark. It’s a blank canvas, but it won’t be as soon as she sees it.  He feels breath on his neck, the cold press of a knife at his ribs.  He has time to think, “ _Shit_.”

The pressure is gone.  Arthur turns as best he can in time to see Eames, forge in place, one hand to either side of her neck. With a twist, he snaps her spine, lets her fall to the ground.  Arthur stares at him, panic still fluttering frantically in his chest.

Eames lets him look for a moment, then inclines his head toward the painting. Arthur nods.  Eames disappears down the hallway.

 

After the job, Arthur stays in London because the low sun and the misty, cloying rain perfectly reflect his aimless sense of ennui.  The fact that the NHS is free, easy, and reliable—especially in contrast to the byzantine and nightmarish time he’d had getting T in Ghana, where he was working for an intolerable six months before this—may also have something to do with it.

So Arthur stays, and he lays low, and he meanders through the Victoria and Albert museum and Hyde Park and goes on long, looping runs along the Thames. He doesn’t go to any more rugby matches, but if he sees a team practicing, he stops and watches for a while, idly trying to imagine a younger, thinner Eames in those tiny white shorts.

He grows a beard, or tries to, just because he can.  It’s annoyingly sparse on his chin, so he keeps it trimmed short. He starts cooking again, downloads recipe books and methodically works through them.  The flat he’s renting has an aging electric stove that must have a loose wire or two somewhere, but it works.  Even if the front right burner can’t heat anything evenly.

All in all, it’s nice to fade into anonymity for a while, to have time completely to himself in a country that isn’t falling apart at the seams.

 

He’s in Marks & Spencer picking up shallots for French Onion Soup when he hears an incredulous, “ _Arthur?_ ”

It’s Eames, staring point blank at him from over the potatoes. Where Arthur’s gone scruffy Eames has gone neat, clean shaven with shorter hair.  He’s in a sport coat that actually looks like it fits him and a shirt that doesn’t make Arthur want to stick his entire face in bleach.

Arthur raises an eyebrow and carefully goes back to picking out his shallots. He’s not surprised that Eames is still in England, but he doesn’t know which alias he’s using so he keeps his mouth shut.  Eames is coming around the aisle, arms spread wide.  “My God it _is_ you, almost didn’t recognize you with the beard—” he rakes his eyes over Arthur “—and the hoodie”  Eames’s arms are around him, pounding him jovially on the back; “What’re you doing these days, still with Amanda?”

Two men in suits move subtly down the aisle towards the tomatoes.

“How like you, mixing business and pleasure,” Arthur says.  Eames winks at him. 

“That’s a rough break, mate, sorry to hear that.  Hey, how about we go out, us lads, like the old days?” Eames grabs the bag of shallots from Arthur’s hand and starts moving them both towards the exit. Arthur lets himself be steered, watching the men in suits slide out the door and the shallots disappear into the inside pocket of Eames’s coat.  He lets Eames shepherd him into a cavernous Starbucks a few blocks away, lets him buy them both venti lattes.  He insists on soy milk in his, mostly to be difficult.

“Thanks for stealing my dinner for me,” he says when they’re seated.

Eames applies himself to sucking down his coffee, probably scalding his entire mouth in the process.  Abstractly, Arthur considers this to be quite a shame.  It’s a nice mouth, all things considered.

“Just pleasure,” Eames says after some silence.  Arthur raises his eyebrows.  “Those lovely besuited gentlemen were merely following up a suspicion.” Eames digs around in a pocket—not the pocket with Arthur’s shallots still in it—and eventually pulls out a small piece of carved jade.  Arthur doesn’t quite get a good look at it before it’s secreted away again.

“Give me back my shallots,” he says, on the subject of Eames’s pockets.

Eames grins obscenely over the lid of his coffee.  Arthur rolls his eyes.

 

Eames doesn’t give him back his shallots until he’s standing inside Arthur’s apartment, wiping his shoes on the doormat and peering down the hallway. “Quite a gaff you’ve got, I like the wallpaper.”

It’s an ugly mustard yellow and Arthur’s landlord won’t let him paint over it.

“Thanks.”

Eames spreads himself out on the couch while Arthur lays out his ingredients in the kitchen, but he comes willingly enough when Arthur barks at him to help him chop onions if he wants to eat.  When he’s done, he rinses the knife, dries it.  Twirls it idly in a hand, watching the light glint off it. Arthur braces himself.

“She’s not like Mal.”

Eames’s eyebrows go up.  “Who’s not, luv?”

“Don’t play dumb.  She’s not like Mal. She’s under control—” Eames’s eyebrows go up _higher_ “—More under control.  She only comes out when I’m overworked.”

“Seems to me that you’re usually overworked.”

Arthur frowns.  “Not enough that she shows up.”

He reaches over Eames for a pot in the drying rack, sets it on the stove, turns on the heat.  The burner clicks and thuds as the stove goes to work.  He grabs a stick of butter from the fridge, cuts off what he needs, puts it back. Eames is still watching him, still holding the knife. 

“What, Eames.  What do you want me to say?” It comes out angrier than he wants it to and he fully expects a brush-off.  Instead, Eames tilts his head, considering.  Arthur slides the butter into the pan, forcing himself to look away.  Eventually, he can’t take it anymore.  “If you’re here out of concern that I’ll get people killed or stuck in limbo, you can leave. You’re free to never work with me again if you don’t trust me.”

Eames hums, tapping the handle of the knife against his palm. “Mal—Dom’s projection of Mal—happened because Dom was not all right.”  Eames inserts himself into Arthur’s line of sight.  “I just want to be sure you’re—”  He shrugs.

Arthur fights the instinct to gape at him.  “You want to be sure I’m all right.”  Eames nods crookedly.  Somehow, he looks embarrassed.  Arthur presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, remembers a moment too late there’s still garlic and onion on them.  It burns. He almost knocks Eames to the floor diving for the sink.

When he’s pretty confident the burning in his eyes is just from the water, he shuts off the tap.  He says into the sink: “If it’s not too much to ask, don’t include this in your evaluation of whether I’m _all right_.”

From beside him, Eames chuckles.  A warm hand on the back of his neck, soothing.  Arthur picks himself up and braces himself on the sink, bowing his head. He’s not sure what he’s doing: the butter is spitting and blackening, smelling acrid; Eames is close, warm and solid and _concerned,_ and Arthur remembers how nice it is to trust incautiously. He should throw Eames out, right now. Eames, who knows too much and sees more. Eames, who takes him to rugby matches and shows him stupid movies like they’re a couple of college kids or something, like their lives aren’t built of carefully counterbalanced lies and omissions. Eames, who wants to know if he’s all right.

“If I kiss you, will you run away again?” Eames asks.  Arthur’s head comes up.  He looks from Eames to the butter burning on the stove and feels himself grin.

“You’re in my house,” he points out, “You have to follow my rules.”

Eames’s eyes go dark.  “All right.”

Arthur cups his jaw firmly and kisses him, hard.  Eames stands absolutely still, opening as Arthur licks the seam of his lips. He tilts his head to accommodate Arthur shoving into his space.  Arthur breaks the kiss: “Rule one.  You touch me where I tell you to touch me, nowhere else.”  Eames nods, sandpaper stubble scraping against Arthur’s cheek. “Rule two.  You ask for what you want.  You let me know if anything I’m doing isn’t OK.”  Another nod.  Arthur nips at Eames’s earlobe, savors the gasp that stutters against his neck. “Rule three.  You make sure the onions don’t burn.”

“Wha—”

Arthur bites the hollow of Eames’s neck, soothes it with his tongue. Eames groans, the hand at the back of Arthur’s neck tightening, tugging him closer.  Arthur steps away.

He makes Eames wait as he scrapes the butter out of the pot and heats more. Makes him wait as he adds the onions, shallots, and garlic; as he pinches in salt and pepper, as he stirs. He pulls his phone from his pocket and sets a timer.  Then he beckons Eames over, making room for him in front of the stove.  “These need to simmer,” Arthur explains.  “You’ll have to stir them occasionally.”  He raises an eyebrow.  “Think you can handle that?”

Eames looks like he’s on his way to being offended, but all he says is, “Of course, darling.” 

“Good.” Arthur steps in again, catches Eames’s mouth.  He keeps the kiss sweet, slow, exploring.  Eames kisses gingerly, like he’s still not sure what he’s allowed.  Arthur tries to teach him, kissing how he likes to be kissed. He feels Eames catch on and moans appreciatively.

Slowly, Arthur works his way down Eames’s body.  He spends a while mapping the tendons in his neck, moves down to undo Eames’s buttons, one by one, kissing down his chest as he goes. Eames is hard with muscle and rough with laser-removed tattoos.  Arthur finds the shadows of a dark tribal swirl on Eames’s shoulder, spidery text under his clavicle.  He bites at it, feels Eames jerk against him.  They’re both sweating in the heat from the stove, the closeness of the kitchen. Arthur slides Eames’s shirt off his shoulders and runs his hands appreciatively down his chest.

Eames watches him, tense under Arthur’s hands.  He twitches when Arthur splays a palm around his hip and squeezes. “The onions,” Arthur reminds him.

“Jesus, Arthur.”  Annoyed, but he stirs them.

Arthur sinks to his knees while Eames is looking away, runs his hands over the tops of Eames’s thighs.  Eames snaps his attention back to Arthur and swallows audibly.  Arthur starts undoing his belt.

“I’ve wanted to do this,” he says conversationally, moving on to the button of Eames’s slacks, “For years.”

“Bloody why _didn’t_ you then?”  Eames’s hands twitch where he’s planted them on the stove, like he wants to reach for Arthur, maybe stroke his cheek.  Arthur wraps a hand around Eames’s cock and watches his mouth drop open. 

Eames’s cock is thick, and half-hard, and Arthur loves it.  He takes his time, working his hands and mouth, and Eames swears and jerks and, eventually, babbles.

“Fuck, Arthur, fuck you’re so good, so pretty for me, you love it, don’t you, you love—aah—you love— _aaaah_ right there, god, Arthur _fuck”_

Arthur reaches up, grabs for one of Eames’s hands, sinks it into his hair. Eames groans, gripping Arthur’s head as if on reflex, tilting it so Arthur’s looking up at him through dark lashes. His cock drags on Arthur’s tongue as Arthur repositions himself.  He swallows Eames down. 

“Close,” Eames pants, curling his fingers tenderly against the nape of Arthur’s neck, “Close.”

Arthur pulls off with an obscene noise.  He mouths the underside of Eames’s cock as he jerks him.  When Eames’s eyes slam shut, so do Arthur’s: a second later, he feels hot pulses of come splatter over his face.  He strokes Eames through it and, eyes still closed, licks the come from his lips.

He’s so hard he might come just from standing up.  He jams a hand into his crotch, hard.  It helps.

Eames’s eyes follow his hand.  He’s flushed, panting, gripping the stove like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. The other hand is still in Arthur’s hair, gently undermining the gel.  “Can I,” his voice is rough, like he’s the one who’s been sucking cock, “Can I do you?”

Arthur shakes his head.  Eames frowns, but nods. For a long moment, they breathe.

“The onions are all right,” Eames says.  Arthur stands, wobbling a little. 

“Great.”

He reaches for a paper towel, wipes his face.  In his pocket, the timer goes off.  Eames raises an eyebrow.

“You were timing yourself?”

“Yes. This is my vibrating dildo. If I hadn’t gotten off by now, it was here to help.”

He inspects the onions: they’ve gone translucent and soft.  “Top cabinet, middle shelf.  Vermouth.”  He makes a beckoning motion with his fingers.  Eames stares at him for a moment before catching on.  His confusion is a physical weight in the room, thickening the air. Arthur breathes long and deep: he can deflect this, he can manage it.  He’s still almost painfully hard, the soft press of his briefs almost too much. He adds the vermouth and a tablespoon of white wine vinegar he keeps on the counter.  The stove protests loudly when he turns up the heat.

Eames is looking at him expectantly, he can tell.  He keeps his eyes on the pot, watching the oil snap itself into drops. Eventually, Eames huffs a breath out through his nose.  “Well, you’re still in the room, anyway.  That’s an improvement.”

Arthur risks a look over: Eames is smiling awkwardly, a hand caught rubbing the back of his head.  He nods in the general direction of Arthur’s crotch. 

“I, ah. If you, if you didn’t—” Arthur has never seen Eames at a loss for words.  It’s cute, somehow.  Endearing. He feels his ears flush with second-hand embarrassment. “If you didn’t _like it_ ,” Eames pinches the bridge of his nose, “You didn’t have to, to do it.” 

Unconsciously, Arthur grinds his hips into the handle of the oven. He’s leaking all over his underwear, still fucking hard despite his growing mortification.  “I,” he swallows.  “I liked it.”  He reaches out, draws Eames in.  “You’re right: I fucking love sucking cock.”  The pot burbles, boiling.  Idly, Arthur turns down the heat.

“You’re going to give me a thing for cooks, darling.”

Arthur kisses him, mostly to shut him up.

 

*

 

The last time Arthur had had sex, he’d been bent over on a shitty bed in a shitty hotel, pants pulled down over his ass but otherwise completely clothed so his partner—a guy who’d picked him up, drunk, at a gay bar—didn’t have to think about his “situation.”  Arthur hadn’t expected much: most of the guys who picked him up in gay bars just wanted somewhere hot and slick to stick their dicks, which, by and large, was fine by Arthur.  He blew them in bathrooms or let them fuck him in their beds, without ever unbuttoning his shirt. He worked a hand in his pants until he shook and saw stars, groaning or clenching around the cock in him, and when they left later, he gave them a fake number and a faker name. The ones who wanted to see him, who wanted to get him off too, were awkward and fumbling and usually gave up when they realized that Arthur’s body drove more like a Ferrari and less like a tractor: lots of controls that needed careful application of fine motor control. Arthur did his best not to hate them, thinking that at least they were willing to try.

The time before that had been tender and complicated. Arthur’d fallen into a relationship, of sorts, during the downtime between jobs, the kind that played at being domestic and involved a lot of holding hands in public.  It had been nice, for the two months that it lasted, but Arthur had been more than ready to leave while his girlfriend, Cherry, had wanted desperately for him to stay.  The night before he shipped off to Lisbon for his next job, she insisted that they fuck as many times as either of them could handle.  Arthur agreed, then lay there feeling useless and awkward while she apologized profusely, handed him a dildo as thick around as his wrist, and explained that she was a complete size queen and, no offense, but he really was rather small.  He wasn’t offended, just puzzled and out of his depth.  Still, he enjoyed watching her, feeling the slick sweaty closeness of her, the tremble of her thighs around his face as he went down on her, dildo gripped steadily in one hand with his mouth on her clit and his fingers in her ass. He left the next morning before Cherry woke up, wondering why he felt so strange.  It wasn’t until he was on the plane that he realized, in the whole two months they’d been together, that her hands had skated off him like oil sliding off water, that whenever he’d looked at her, she’d been looking over his shoulder. 

The time before that had been in college, with Gregoire.  Gregoire taught Arthur how to teach lovers how to touch him, how to find words he liked for his body.  Gregoire taught him how to swear in French, how to rim someone, how to treat something that looked like a dick like the clit it was.  Gregoire, who was tender and sweet but who disappeared across the world when their visa expired.  Their goodbye was a tender kiss at the airport that tasted like cigarettes and finality.

Sex, it seemed to Arthur, was a race, or maybe a tug-of-war.  In either case, the goal was to finish before the other person left: left the room, left the relationship, left the country. If you failed, it was just masturbation, and you could do that perfectly well without involving anyone else. Arthur didn’t sleep with coworkers—because his history was something inextricable from fucking, a tactical disadvantage that could be easily and viciously exploited—and increasingly he didn’t sleep with anyone else, either.  He envied Dom and Mal their easy intimacy, envied the dreamers who seemed satisfied by getting off only in dreams.  He envied everyone who could have sex without planning the whole thing like a military operation: go-zones and no-go zones, bodies divided up like contested territory. He knew his lovers saw him as a stick-in-the-mud, a control freak whose anal-retentive tendencies extended to the bedroom.  Maybe they were right. Maybe it didn’t matter that he did what he did out of a sense of protection, not of preference.

But in dreamshare, protection outweighed preference every time. So Arthur got into the habit of keeping himself covered, of keeping his suits on on the rare occasions he went out, of playing up the PowerBottom Twink-Dom persona that guys fitted him to. It worked, by and large. If sex was a race, he was generally winning.  If it was a tug-of-war, he was keeping the tag on the rope his side of center.  If it was something else, something that had to do with trust, with intimacy, well.  Intimacy was a weapon he rarely holstered and trust a currency slippery and gold.

 

*

 

In the end, Arthur lets Eames stay.  He lets him sit across the tiny kitchen table and slurp at soup, lets him steal the bowls out of Arthur’s hands and put them in the sink.  He lets him cage Arthur against the counter and kiss him. Eames’s body is bowed away from his, only touching Arthur’s lips, his arms.  Eames breaks the kiss and steps back, not like he’s asking for permission, but like he’s done.  Like kissing Arthur was all he ever wanted or needed to do.

Arthur lets out a long, shaky breath.  His fingers find Eames’s.  He feels a little like he felt the first time he went under into a shared dream: falling backwards into blackness.  “Come on,” he says softly, and he leads Eames to his bedroom. 

He lets go of Eames at the threshold and makes a show of putting things away. There’s not much in the way of mess: a few stray shirts that he pitches in the hamper, his laptop and a book in a short stack that he straightens.  Eames stands by the door, fiddling with something in his pockets.

“Nice room,” he says, crossing to the window.  Arthur scoots out of his way, trying to look as little like a caged animal as possible.  It doesn’t help that he feels like one, heart racing, hands shaking a little as he smooths over the neat coils of his power cord.  Eames peers out the window, rubbing absently at his mouth, “Quite a view.”

Arthur snorts.  The view is a brick wall and a narrow lane with some garbage cans in it.  “I love the smell of trash in the morning.” Eames shrugs like he’s not judging Arthur for liking such things. 

“Still though, not a bad place to lie low for a while.  Surprised you could get it, really, with the housing crunch. Most blokes’d be renting a bed that someone else sleeps in while they’re at work.”

“I’m not at work,” Arthur points out.  He leans a hip against his bedside table, crosses his arms.  Eames is still at the window, leaning out it like he might be able to see something other than blank, rancid alley.  “And I can afford the privacy, so.”

There’s a beat of silence.  Eames twitches at Arthur’s curtains, knocks discerningly at the window frame. Anyone else, Arthur thinks, would wear this moment awkwardly, but Eames looks for all the world like he’s casually inspecting a friend’s new apartment, trying to decide whether Arthur should ask the landlord to fix the trellis.  He’s going to let it drop, Arthur realizes.  He’s going to let the whole thing drop.  Tenderness stills his fingers, catches his breath. Eames isn’t going to ask awkward questions, or any questions at all.  He’s going to let Arthur be mysterious and incomprehensible, and if Arthur asks him to leave he’ll go, just like that.  “Gloucester won the season,” he comments idly, “Fourth cup in six years.” He draws his head back inside. “If I’d known you were around I’d’ve brought you to the final.”

Arthur smiles, giddily, like a complete idiot. 

“You all right, pet?”

“Yeah. Yeah I am.”  He sits on the bed, crosses his legs.  Nods for Eames to join him. 

“If you like, I can pull up the match on that brick of yours.”  Arthur shakes his head.

“Maybe later.  Look, uh,” No matter how many times he says it, it’s never easy.  It’s never been a gift easily given.  “If this goes poorly, you’re never going to see me again.”

Eames leans forward.  “What, exactly?” Arthur gestures between them.

“This. You’ll get it in a minute. Point is, I want you to know right now that this conversation stays right here.”  Eames nods.

“This about the woman then?”

“Yes and no.”  Arthur lets himself take a moment.  Lets himself breathe. He listens to Eames wait: his attention is quiet, a weight without being a pull.  Arthur could get up and walk out, tell him to forget it, and he would.  “I want you to fuck me.” He starts with what’s easy. “I’ve wanted you to fuck me for, probably years.  Doesn’t really matter.”

He looks out the window, trying to ignore Eames’s shadow in the corner of his eye. “You’ve read my background. You know some of the names I used to go by.” He scrubs a hand against his knee, shaking a little again.  “There was another name.  Before all of those. Before Arthur.

“I’m not telling you what it is.  It’s a girl’s name, though.”  He pauses to let that sink in.

“Some parents are odd ducks,” Eames offers. 

“No. Mine weren’t.  They went with what the doctors told them.” He can feel a bitter smile twisting at his mouth.  “Mr and Mrs, you have a happy, healthy little girl.  Everyone believed them, including me, for awhile.

“Anyway, doesn’t matter.  The point is, I’m a guy. You know that. I’m just a guy with a, a non-standard set of genitals.”

There’s a pause.  Arthur shuts his eyes. He can all but feel Eames’s weight disappear from the end of the bed.  It’s a forty minute cab ride to Heathrow: he can be out of the country in an hour, tops.  He thinks he hears a door slam, tells himself he’s being stupid.

“The scars on your chest,” Eames says quietly, “Those aren’t from lung surgery.” Arthur shakes his head tightly. Eames hmm’s and his weight shifts on the bed. Arthur jumps when a set of warm hands cover his, clenched on his knees.  Eames ducks his head until Arthur can’t help but look at him. “Just tell me what you like, yeah? And I’ll do it.”

 

*

 

When he undresses him, Eames is hungry.  His hands skate across Arthur’s shoulders, his ribs, the dip of his back between his shoulder blades.  He whispers hot, delicate things into Arthur’s skin, “Gorgeous,” he says, “God, look at you,” “ _Arthur_.” He mouths over Arthur like he’s learning a prayer.  Arthur clings to Eames’s shoulders, fumbles ineffectually at his clothes until Eames takes his hands and kisses them, strips fast and tips Arthur back onto the bed. Then there’s skin, sweet and warm—Arthur had forgotten how physically _hot_ sex was, how cooling skin jumps and shivers in the wake of a hand, a tongue.  He bites down hard on the back of his hand, trying to ground himself. Eames is working his way down Arthur’s body, the calluses on his fingers rough over Arthur’s sides, and Arthur pictures how he got them: disassembling a pistol in a dark hotel room, skinning a palm on a wall as he flees a job gone bad, twitching his totem between his fingers, fast and lithe.  Arthur thinks about those thick, swift fingers _in_ him, the stretch and dance and burn, and he moans.  He’s hard and leaking, legs trapped between Eames’s as Eames finds the top of his pelvis and stays there a while, nipping and sucking at the bone, breathing hot and wet over the skin of Arthur’s belly.  His hands are on Arthur’s hips, splayed wide on his back and his ass, teasingly close, and in a moment Arthur forgets himself, takes his hand out of his mouth and runs the back of it down the side of Eames’s face, feeling his jaw work as his hands knead the flesh of Arthur’s ass, and in a broken, needy whine, Arthur begs.

“Eames, _Eames_ , Eames please, please.  Please fuck me.”

Eames stills suddenly, fingers light on the insides of Arthur’s thighs. “What—“ Arthur starts, angry in a way that is fast and hot and hiding fear. This is where it stops, where it falls apart, where Eames will start looking at him like he’s a problem to be solved, or, worse, like he’s unsolvable, a mystery wrapped in an enigma shrouded by something that looks not nearly enough like the standard definition of “penis”.  Arthur wishes he’d just get on with it, that he’d get up and get dressed and walk out already

“Darling,” Eames says, gentle, careful, “I don’t want to cock this up.”

Arthur shuts his eyes and forces himself to breathe.  He feels high and shaky, like something is squeezing tight in his throat. He’s not sure if he wants to cry or laugh or beg.

“It’s called a cock,” he says finally, forcing the words out through gritted teeth. He has to believe Eames will stay, that he’ll be gentle and forgiving and game.  “It’s up, and you should suck it.”

Eames huffs out a startled laugh even as his eyes go dark. “Arthur.”  He sucks a mark into the crease of Arthur’s thigh. Hot breath bursts over Arthur’s cock and he whines, desperation sweeping in with his relief. “Do tell me before you come down my throat, won’t you?  I like to be prepared.”

“Fuck,” Arthur swears reverently, tugging roughly at Eames.  The hot slick of Eames’s mouth closes over his cock and he jerks with it, body tight like a bow and singing with pleasure. “Fuck.”

 

“So is this the reason for all the suits then?” Eames asks, languidly smoothing down Arthur’s arm where it lies thrown over his chest.  Arthur, who has been idly tracing one of Eames’s tattoos, stills.

“If you honestly think—” he starts.  Eames puts a finger to his lips.

“Of course I don’t think it’s the only reason, love.  I’m just interested to know if it’s a contributing factor.”

Arthur sighs and mouths at Eames’s fingertip.  “I liked menswear before I knew anything about gender shit. It’s clean, crisp. Subtle.  Buying a lot of it when I got older was probably a response to having two things I’d never had before.

“Freedom, I presume,” Eames rumbles, and the finger on Arthur’s lips moves to stroke the line of his jaw, catching a little on the stubble there. “And?”

“Money.” He considers telling Eames that he still gets T through insurance fraud, that for some reason he can’t just purchase it at cost, even though by now he can afford it.  For that matter, he can afford to buy T for all the guys he knows who need it, and to fully fund their Kickstarter surgery campaigns. He hasn’t, though, and the thought makes him feel a little sick.

Too traceable.  To small a community. He’d be caught.

Sometimes he feels like he stayed in dreamshare because it was a convenient way to avoid really coming out.

“Hey, love,” Eames says, perhaps feeling how Arthur’s gone stiff against him, “No shame in taking care of yourself, all right?  No shame at all in that.”

He leans over and presses a soft, sweet kiss to Arthur’s temple. Arthur, deciding he’s spending too much time in his own head, catches Eames’s mouth with his own. Eames’s hand tightens on his waist, pressing Arthur into him.  Arthur lets himself be pulled, fits himself against all the contours of Eames, kisses big and open and just a little sloppy.

Eames’s hand on his hip trips up his side, dances over his ribs until there’s a light, exquisite caress on one of Arthur’s scars.  He groans into Eames’s mouth, shifting slightly away to give him better access.  Eames drags his nail over the narrow ridge of tissue and Arthur shudders.

“Fuck,” he pants, feeling a flood of want in his gut.  His skin feels like it’s on fire, his scar a bright spark of pleasure. He bites at Eames’ mouth, the cool, slick slide of their kiss a heady counterpart to the wonders Eames is working on his chest.  Objectively, Arthur knows his scars are sensitive.  He counts them as part of his personal catalogue of Things to Touch to Get Off. But where Arthur’s calculating with himself, working himself up like he’s climbing a familiar set of stairs, Eames is discovering.  Light touches, biting touches, little quirks of contact that Arthur’d never even thought to try; unpredictable and, somehow, joyful.

Eames breaks the kiss and Arthur chases him.  He’s evasive, pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses to the underside of Arthur’s jaw, the tendons of his neck, the dip of his clavicle.  Eames continues down his sternum and Arthur’s desperate for it, canting his hips up and making little broken noises he couldn’t stop if he wanted to. Eames presses a kiss to a nipple that Arthur doesn’t really feel, his hand stilling on Arthur’s scar.

“Get on with it,” Arthur grits out.  He’s desperate and wanton and needy, and all he wants in the entire world is for Eames to keep touching him.

But Eames seems infuriatingly set on being a tease.  He shakes his head, the scratch of stubble wrenching another groan out of Arthur.  It’s not enough, not enough, and he realizes suddenly—he’s chanting it, twitching his hips, hands twisting in the sheets.

Eames is grinning at him like fractured sunlight.

“These,” He kisses Arthur’s nipple again, rolling it between his teeth, sucking, “Don’t seem very sensitive.”  He licks a broad stroke over Arthur’s pec, tantalizingly close.

“But these,” and Arthur lets out a broken sob of relief because _yes_ , this means Eames’s _mouth_ “Get quite the response.”  Eyes dark and feral, Eames bites at Arthur’s scars, licking over them to soothe the hurt.  Arthur arcs off the bed, sinking both hands into Eames’s hair, holding him in place. He’s wrecked, absolutely wrecked. He shouldn’t be so undone by so little but he _is_ , because Eames seems to know how Arthur likes to be touched without fumbling around his body like he’s some sort of complex, three dimensional puzzle.

Now, Eames hauls at Arthur’s hips, lifting him enough that Eames can fit a thick thigh between them.  Arthur cries out, pushing down hard, chasing the feeling of his achingly hard cock against Eames. He’s breathless, hips moving on needy instinct, and he watches Eames watching him, huge and possessive, and Arthur draws him down again, mashing Eames’ face roughly against his chest. Eames takes the hint and puts his mouth back to work, sucking and nipping up and down the lines of Arthur’s scars as he presses Arthur’s shoulders into the mattress, holding him fast. Arthur bucks against his leg and Eames starts pushing back, tiny thrusts that drag against Arthur’s swollen cock, and he bites particularly hard at the end of the scar under Arthur’s arm, sucking a bruise, and Arthur thrusts, Arthur sobs, and Arthur comes.

Eames rides him through it, hands replacing his mouth on Arthur’s chest, rubbing spit-slick, and he surges up to kiss Arthur deep and sharp and dirty, sucking at him like he wants to draw everything Arthur is out through his mouth. His leg drives harder between Arthur’s, and Arthur can feel the slick of his come as he rocks back against it in short, shallow thrusts, almost too much.

“Eames,” Arthur breathes, stilling, “Eames.”

“Right here love, I’ve got you.”

Arthur opens his eyes, finding Eames a breath away, and he can’t bring himself to stop the smile that splits his face wide open.  Eames reaches a tentative hand down and strokes Arthur’s cheek. “Darling,” he says. Arthur nods, feeling full to bursting with some warm, bright emotion deep behind his ribs.  He skates his hands up Eames’s arms until he’s cupping his face, fingers wrapped around the back of Eames’s neck.  He smells like sweat and sex and the ends of cigarettes. Arthur breathes him in, holding him steady, holding him close.  It’s not a luxury he usually allows himself—but then again he hasn’t been naked with anyone in years, and this whole situation is strange and new and young.

Eames dips down to bite softly at Arthur’s neck.  He shifts his leg until his hips are flush with Arthur’s, his erection an insistent pressure on Arthur’s stomach.  “Not that I don’t love this tender gazing,” he says, sucking at Arthur’s earlobe, “But you’re somewhere I’m not right now and I’d love” he rolls his hips pointedly, “To join you.”

“Come on then,” Arthur says, slipping a hand around Eames’s cock, “Finish it.”

Eames groans and cages his arms around Arthur’s head, down on his forearms, their bodies pressed in a tight, hot line.  He fucks Arthur’s fist with short, hard thrusts, mouthing sloppily along Arthur’s jaw, breathing low, needy whines into his neck.  They stay like that for long minutes, Arthur enjoying the jerk and weight of Eames against him, and then Eames shifts up a little and his hips cant tight against Arthur’s and Arthur starts working his cock, squeezing and dragging in earnest, thumbing across the head and slicking down Eames’ length. Eames collapses, arms everywhere around Arthur, scooping him up and holding him close as Eames thrusts in a broken, stuttering, rhythm. 

He comes with a loud, long gasp into Arthur’s neck, spilling a hot stream onto Arthur’s chest and belly.  They lie together, breathing in an erratic rhythm, until Arthur shivers reflexively at the cooling air on his bare legs.

When Eames pulls back, he swipes come off Arthur’s skin and offers it to him like it’s ambrosia.

 

*

 

Eames has heard of transgender people before, but he’s not entirely sure he’s ever met one.  He forged one once, a confusing cocoon of physicality and mannerism that he’s increasingly sure he got horribly wrong.  He thinks he understands the basic concept, and a few sessions of discrete research give him an idea of the mechanics.  He learns that trans people are to be referred to as “transgender” not “transgendered,” because identity is not something that gets done to you.  He learns that people who are assigned female at birth and transition to male are called “FTM”.  He learns what the phrase “assigned female at birth” means.  He finds a forum of trans guys talking about medical transition: double mastectomies as keyholes or double incisions: which surgeons are good, which aren’t, how to minimize scarring, how long recovery usually takes. It turns out that a lot of the guys on the forum tell people they’ve had lung surgery. 

From there, Eames scrolls through some conversations about hormone treatments—colloquially referred to as “T”—and hysterectomies before he clicks through to a gallery of pictures taken post-bottom surgery. 

Eames concludes that the cock Arthur has is probably the result of years of T and possibly, though probably not, a metoidioplasty.  He doesn’t know if Arthur’s thinking of getting one in the future, or if maybe he’s considering a phalloplasty, where a phallus would be built from his own skin.

He rereads every copy of Arthur’s background that he can get his hands on without raising eyebrows.  None of them mention any female identities, any medical history outside of an allergy to egg whites and a painfully thorough catalog of the injuries Arthur’s sustained on jobs.

Transition, in a manner of speaking, is a long, painful, permanent forge. A forge so deep and well-researched that it becomes reality.  Mal’s vicious, twisted face flashes in Eames’s mind and he thinks, no, not like that. It doesn’t supplant reality: it’s not a forge at all.  Like waking up from two layers down in a dream, it’s stripping off the unreal to expose the truth underneath.

Maybe dreaming isn’t a metaphor for transition.  Maybe transition can’t fit the metaphor of dreaming.

Regardless, though, dreams are an infinite playground, a place of pure possibility. And Eames remembers the hunger in Arthur’s eyes when he’d first seen Eames forge.

 

On the night before their next job is set to go off, Eames trails a hand over Arthur’s shoulders, hunched where he bends over the scale model of the dreamscape. He’s running through the job in his head, Eames knows, burning it into his brain so deep that Eames will be picking out pieces of it in dreams they share four months from now. It’s one of Arthur’s anxious habits, little tells that aren’t as little as Arthur would like them to be. Eames thinks they fit him: hidden in plain sight, too obvious; they make people wary of him, sure he’s inscrutable. When they look past his crossed arms, his raised eyebrows, and find no other roads in.  A con man with his fear worn like armor.  A paradox.

Arthur, already tense, doesn’t flinch.  He keeps tracing over the elegant curves of the foam core maze, focus unbroken by Eames’s intrusion.  Trust looks strange when it’s refracted through the prism of violence.

“Won’t you take a ride with me?” Eames murmurs in his ear.  Arthur doesn’t nod, but he cants a hip in Eames’s direction, crosses his legs idly at the ankles.  Eames keeps walking, goes into the back room of the warehouse, with its lounge chairs and the neat lines of the PASIV, to wait.

 

Arthur joins him about twenty minutes later.  “Going under the night before is bad luck, Mr Eames.”  He rolls his sleeves crisply, exposing the scabbed insides of his elbows. 

“What’s luck when you have skill, darling.”

Eames dreams them into a hotel room, pristine and not lavish. The furnishings are minimalist, black and square.  Arthur’s in a devastatingly dapper suit of light chocolate wool with a waistcoat that gleams gold as he straightens his cuffs.  His face his open, puzzled. 

A train rattles by, close enough to shudder the windows.  Eames’s nerves, traveling fast.  He should be beyond this: he’s been dreaming for a decade and conning for a decade more.  He hasn’t stayed alive this long by giving away his hand with fucking _trains_. That’s the kind of bullshit that stopped him working with Dom Cobb.

Arthur cottons on, the bastard.  He softens a little, straight lines going curved.  Eames wonders wildly for a moment if he’s seeing something maternal in Arthur now, something ancient and young.  That’s stupid, it’s ridiculous, and he knows better.  He needs to convince Arthur he knows better, because Arthur wears distrust like bespoke broadcloth, like old, well-worn shoes. “Eames,” he says, just a bit unsure, “We could’ve just gone to my hotel.” 

“Ah, but there are so few things there we haven’t tried.”

It’s true: they’ve fucked on every flat surface and up against most of the walls, and once, memorably, against the window, Arthur riding him with little stutters of his hips, Eames’s back chilled where it pressed against the glass. Arthur smirks, at ease again. He shrugs jauntily, trails a finger over the clean lines of the desk.  “Have I left you somehow,” a coquettish glance down at his fingers, nimbly tapping at the wood, “Unsatisfied?” 

“Not me, darling,” Eames replies, going for the knot of his tie, “You.”

Arthur quirks an eyebrow.  “What—”

Eames kisses him, gentle but not soft enough to unnerve him more. Arthur takes a moment to respond, so Eames cards a hand through his hair, teasing at the gel until it gives and Arthur groans a little as Eames presses into his scalp. He opens, kissing Eames in little soft sips.  “I’m not unsatisfied.” He nips the words into Eames’s bottom lip.  “I don’t know why you think you have to—”

Eames shushes him with a finger to the lips.  Arthur takes it as an invitation, licks it wet.  Want hits Eames like a punch in the gut—trust Arthur to have weaponized seduction: he has a Midas touch, everything turning to sharpened steel. Eames pulls away, strokes Arthur’s cheek down to his shoulder, holds him in place.

“D’you know the secret to forging,” Eames says.  Arthur shakes his head.  “There isn’t one. It’s just like building dream space.”

He takes Arthur’s hand, smooths a palm over it.  Arthur looks down at the Penrose steps now tattooed across the back of his hand in stippled dot work.

“The talent is in finding out what to change.  All the keystones of how a mark sees the person you’re trying to forge. Is there a lilt to their laugh, a tilt to the head, that would give them away no matter what.”

The ink lifts itself off Arthur’s skin, floats in the air in the form of the steps, a tiny inversion of space.  “In dreams, nothing seems bizarre at first.  You can be standing in something that looks nothing like your house—but you know that’s where you are.  The forge can look very little like the person in waking life, but as long as you’ve got the keys down pat, the mark will know.  Granted, there’s a lot of stick-in-the-mud extractors who won’t let you be anything but realistic: they’re afraid the dreamer will figure out he’s dreaming and make the team.  Awfully unimaginative, really.”

The ink collapses back into Arthur’s skin.  Eames threads their fingers together, feels Arthur’s breath catch. “So, Arthur, what would you look like, in your wildest dreams?”

Arthur licks his lips, quick, nervous maybe.  But when he speaks, it’s the same cool, collected voice from topside that he might use to order coffee.  “I see what you’re doing, Mister Eames.  No. My answer is no.” A smirk, dark eyes under darker lashes. “We have another hour and a half in the dream, though.  It’d be a shame to waste it.”

They end up on the bed: not very creative despite the infinite freedom of dream space. Eames points this out and Arthur scoffs, planting kisses and bites down Eames’s stomach.  He draws Eames out of his trousers and sucks him down, moving sinuous and fast.  Eames hangs on as long has he can, but Arthur is sinfully good and too soon he’s hauling him up by the hair, dragging him in for a bruising, searing kiss. 

He lets Arthur dream their clothes away, and that’s where everything goes wrong.

“What the fuck.” Arthur almost shrieks. He’s off Eames like a shot, across the room in an instant.  Faster than he could ever move in real life.  “Eames what the _fuck_.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t you, darling?”  Eames nods at the cock that’s bobbing between Arthur’s legs, cut, blushing and fully hard. It’s slim, like Arthur and it curves a little to the left. 

“ _Yes_ I’m fucking sure,” Arthur screams, face blanched an ugly white, shaking. He looks up, meets Eames’s eyes. He’s coiled rage, burning up, wilder with anger than he’s ever been.  Eames tries to look nonthreatening.  The forge shouldn’t have stuck this long: it should have been dropped when Arthur said no.  He knows, he _knows_ he should have dropped it.  But if he’s honest he’s been shattered with nerves trying to get this _right_ , trying to do something genuinely _nice_ for Arthur, and in the trying he’s instead done absolutely everything wrong.

He could try to tell himself that he was looking forward to being fucked too much, but the excuse is so disgusting he can’t even properly finish thinking it. Meanwhile, Arthur is staring at him like he’s waiting for something, like he’s daring to hope that Eames, who can become any person at the drop of a hat, can somehow become a person who has not royally and utterly fucked up.

Eames tries to speak at the same moment that Arthur gives up on him.

“Arthur—” he starts, but Arthur’s pulled a gun out of the air and put it to his temple. Blood and brain and shards of skull splatter on the wall as he crumples to the floor, and Eames sits on the bed as long as he can as the room disintegrates around him, staring dumbly at Arthur’s corpse.

Eames hadn’t changed anything above Arthur’s waist, wanting to see if he’d fill in the rest himself.  Even in death, Arthur had left his scars.

 

*

 

The next day, Arthur pays exactly as much attention to Eames as he needs to to get the job done smoothly.  He’s as put together as always, holding the dream steady without any apparent effort. When his projections start going after the team, even they don’t target Eames specifically. Eames spends the entirety of the job slightly off-balance: he’s sure he hurt Arthur, probably deeply. He wonders if he’ll be forgiven, if at some point the other shoe will drop.  But, when the extraction’s complete and the projections are chasing him and Arthur down a broad, Paris-inspired boulevard and a taxi swipes into Eames’s hip, Arthur screams, “ _Are you all right?_ ” and that’s all the answer Eames needs.

That is, until Arthur cuts out as soon as the job is done, gets off the train early and disappears.  Eames remembers the first night, in Arthur’s rented London flat: _If this goes poorly you’re never going to see me again_.  Trust Arthur to make room in an ultimatum for professionalism but not for forgiveness. Eames stares out the scratched plexiglas window of the train and rubs a hand agitatedly over his chin. Arthur wears memory like armor, hands out his past like an exam with one right answer.  Getting to know him feels a lot like being granted very high-level security clearance.  Eames wonders how many times he’s been sold out over this, how deep he’s stuffed his identity that nobody in dream share has any _idea_.  Nobody except, now, Eames.

He spends four months looking for Arthur harder than he’ll ever admit to. He’s not the best at cyber crime, but he calls in some favors.  They turn up a lot of fake travel records and several aliases, but nothing that actually helps.  Trails run cold, fabricated identities disappear overnight, bread crumb clues rot in server archives, mocking him.  He doesn’t give up, not exactly, but he does accept, after a long, hard drinking session and subsequent transformatively horrible hangover, that Arthur will show up when he’s ready, and not a second sooner.

As if on cue, Eames’s phone buzzes from the arm of the couch.  There’s a text from an unknown number, as unsubtle as every one of Arthur’s tells: _Berlin_.  _Be sober._

 

*

 

 

Eames expects to meet Arthur in a hotel bar or some hip, discreet urban cafe. Instead, Arthur sends him the GPS coordinates to a park on the outskirts of the city proper, right on the bank of the Spree.  It’s an abandoned theme park, ivy and pondweed choking ride carriages rusty with flaking paint. Eames stumbles upon three groups of teenagers fancying themselves hardcore criminals before he finds Arthur, sitting cross-legged on the tracks of the flume ride around a bend from the rotting operator’s booth.  In his T-shirt and cuffed jeans, he barely looks older than the teenagers.

“You’re provisionally forgiven because I choose to believe you didn’t know better.”  Eames is used to walking into conversations other people have been having for weeks, so he shrugs and makes a show of hopping over the last few ties.  Arthur squints up at him, the sun behind Eames’s shoulder casting his face pale white.  Wherever he’s been in the last year, it hasn’t been the tropics.

“They ask you, before they’ll write you a letter for surgery, sometimes before they give you the diagnosis in the first place, whether you dream yourself as a man. The right answer is yes, obviously.”

“When you were asked, did you lie?” Eames wants to know.  He’s got a little bit of whiplash, thrown suddenly into the deep end of Arthur’s past, and he feels distinctly like he’s forgotten how to swim. Part of him is panicking: he doesn’t want this, doesn’t want to be someone who knows Arthur’s secrets. Knowing secrets only puts them on offer for thieves.  He’d hate to lead an extraction team straight into Arthur by deflecting them from his own valuables.

The fact that he’s thinking this means he wants to know.  He’s wanted to know since he saw Arthur’s scars for the first time, but the want has changed color over time, weathering from a pale, petty curiosity into a deep, vibrant desire.  It’s like Arthur buried him in tangled cloth, and he’s just now unfolding it and finding a tapestry.

Arthur hesitates, deliberating.  Remembering, maybe.  Weighing.

“Yes and no.  I don’t usually have a visible body when I dream naturally.  There’s something there to hold my head up, so my eyes are the right height above the ground, you know, something that runs when there’s something chasing me. That kind of thing. But I don’t remember any dreams where I’ve looked down and seen, like, a dick, or I’ve looked in a mirror and seen myself with stubble or anything.  I’ve never had a specifically male body.  But gender’s not your body.  So every dream I’ve ever had—well, since I was thirteen anyway—has been a dream of me as a man.”

“I shouldn’t have assumed what I did,” Eames says.  He settles down by Arthur, sitting crossways to him, one foot dangling over the edge of the tracks. 

“No,” Arthur agrees, “You shouldn’t have.”

“I shouldn’t have done anything to you either.”

“No,” Arthur says again, but more gently, “You shouldn’t have done anything I didn’t _want_ you to do.”

He smiles, a little, grinning wryly at his feet.  He still looks young, sunny and sun-drenched, and Eames notices for the first time the thin line of a scar high on Arthur’s cheek, in his laugh lines. It’s faint, straight: the kind a kid might get if he fell out of a tree or bashed his head bouncing on a bed. Eames beams, leaning back and staring up at the clear, open sky.  After a moment, Arthur shoves at him.  “In case I’m unclear,” he says as he leans into Eames’s space, “I want you to kiss me.”

Forgoing saying anything cheesy like, “Your wish is my command,” Eames instead whispers “Arthur,” reverently, against his lips.  He feels Arthur smile, big and broad and dimpled, and he kisses that smile, sweet and soft.

“Hey, you!” someone shouts in loud, accented English.  Arthur breaks the kiss, peering over Eames’s shoulder. Eames turns and sees a portly middle-aged man in a wrinkled white shirt and pressed navy blue trousers. He’s got a badge on his shoulder and a hand raised, pointing at them.

Eames beams up at Arthur.  “Security’s gonna run us down hard.”

Arthur grins back, luminous.  “And we will lead them on a merry chase.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by the amazing nikotehfox. All loopy syntax completely my fault, as she told me not to and I did anyway. 
> 
> Come find me on tumblr ( http://andropogonfalons.tumblr.com )


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